I also guest-blogged over at Strange Culture today…go check it out!

With Thanksgiving just around the corner and all shopping venues looking like Santa’s toy shop, I am beginning to get excited for all of the wonderful things this time of year brings!

I know that the holidays are not always a happy time for everyone. I remember the first set of holidays the year my parents divorced felt cold and just, well, not normal.  Some years you just don’t feel like there is much to celebrate or be thankful for and you just want to fast forward so  life as usual can resume. I get that. I have felt like that for several holiday seasons.

But this year, I am excited for the holidays. I love eating a glorious Thanksgiving meal with family and friends, putting up our Christmas tree, listening to holiday music, baking and eating yummy treats, snow, parties and gatherings, serving others, finding gifts for loved ones….my list could go on and on!

And even though your local mall and Target have both by-passed Thanksgiving, it is a beautiful day to remember the blessings that God has given each of us and to enjoy time with people we care about and love. This week my friend Connie shared with me what God is teaching her about praise and taking time to praise and give thanksgiving to God for what He has done in her life, even in the small details that are easily overlooked.  Through our conversation I was reminded of my own need to praise God for what He has done in my life and in the lives of those around me! For as much time as I spend telling God about my concerns and requests for all that I worry about, I certinaly short-change Him in my response to His answers – both those that I am happy with and those that I do not understand…either way, praise is due. Here is a beautiful passage of Scripture that stuck out to me this week.

Today, I am praising God for the gift of Jesus, that I know Him, and also that so many of the people I love know Him. What a blessing. I also am praising Him that I can  share this message with those who don’t know Him – the blessing of a burden and opportunity.

So let me know what you are thankful for! Link to a post you have written about being thankful, or just leave a comment…I think it is awesome and encouraging to read about what others are blessed with, and  I’m going to try to post a few other things in the coming week that give me a thankful heart.

And on a practical side note about holidays…Holly over at The Preacher’s Wife wrote an awesome post about surviving the holidays with family. Go, read it! It is great advice and perspective. Ryan and I always set up front expectations before visiting family and it makes the experience much more enjoyable for everyone!

Linden bear (that is one of my nicknames for her) turned 16 months old on October 20! This month has been so fun – every month is, and every month seems even better (and easier!) than the last.

Linden has added so many new words to her volcabulary, and teeth to her mouth, this month that it is hard for me to keep up!

Some of her favorite new words include:

• Ball
• Buh-Bye (she previously just said bye, and it is really bye-bye, but buh-bye is how it sounds!)
• Ball
• Uh-Oh (previously she would just say Oh!)
• Blue
• Star
• Night-night
• All done
• More
• Up
• Grandpa (‘Pa)
• Snow (more like ‘no)
• Nose
• Teeth
• Ear
• (will point to a picture of her self and say)… “Das’ Me!”
• Nana (what she calls Ryan’s Mom)
• Vroom-Vroom (the noise a car makes!)
• Animal sounds and names for pig, cow, dog, cat

This month Linden has really enjoyed her nose…her little trick is to squeeze her nose and say “honk, honk,” and then she will generally lean over and do the same to you! She has also enjoyed hosting her own crib parties and would self entertain for hours if we let her stay there! The self-hosted crib parties seem to have curbed her desire to climb out of her crib, which she has already done 2-3 times. Oh my, I am not ready for that, and she is not ready for her big girl bed – she would never stay in it!

Right now she is working on her 2 top eye teeth and then 2 additional teeth on the bottom, next to her molars.

She will eat pretty much anything – especially if she can figure out how to eat it with her fork. She has successfully eaten toast and Triscuit crackers with her fork…she is yet to conquor Goldfish crackers with her fork, but I wouldn’t count her out yet.

Where did my little baby go?!

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s beginning to look a lot like…oh wait, it’s only October. We still have a few more months before Christmas. But when I look outside, it does, kinda look like Christmas…

So far our drifts are about 3-4 feet tall, but we have probably only gotten about 18 in. of snow in the last 24 hours. The local weather folks say that it should stop snowing late tonight. 

 

At Sherri’s request…here is the recipe for my momma’s homemade whole wheat pizza crust that I referenced in my last post! Sometimes I become intimidated by yeast, but trust me, this is delicious and very easy to make.

 This will  make enough dough for 2 large pizza’s.

2 1/4 tsp. active dry yeast

2 tsp. brown sugar

1 1/2 c. warm water (80-110 degrees F)

1 tsp. salt

2 Tbl. olive oil

1 1/4 c. all-purpose whole wheat flour

1 1/4 c. all-purpose flour

Italian Seasoning

Yellow Cornmeal

Olive Oil

Parmesan Cheese

 

1. In a large bowl, dissolve brown sugar and yeast in warm water. Let set for 10 minutes.

 

2. Stir salt and olive oil into yeast solution. Mix in 2 1/2 cups of flour (half of this amount should be whole wheat, and half should be white) until well blended. Add in more flour until dough is no longer sticky and easy to work with. (You may not need all 3 1/2 cups or you may need much more than that amount–it depends of the weather!)

 

3. Knead dough with hands for about 10 minutes, or until dough is smooth and soft. Add more flour to dough as necessary. 

 

4. Place dough ball in a well oiled bowl and cover with a cloth. Set the bowl in a warm location to let the dough rise until double in size (about 1 hour).

5. After 1 hour, punch down dough and divide into two tight balls. Allow to rest for one minute. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.

 

6. Roll dough out onto a floured surface. Sprinkle pizza crust with Italian seasoning. If using a pizza stone, lightly dust top of stone with flour and cornmeal. Place dough on stone and brush outer edge (where the crust will be) with olive oil and sprinkle with parmesan cheese. Poke inner (non-crust) area with a fork to create air holes. Bake crust on lowest rack in oven for approximately 5-10 minutes (depending on thickness) just until lightly browned. Remove from oven to add toppings.

 

Yummy!!!

 

You may wonder why not 100% whole wheat…the dough can tend to taste rather grainy, which is also why I think my mom would add a little brown sugar when dissolving the yeast…to help give a little sweetness to the whole wheat. I have done this using only whole wheat only, but I personally prefer doing 1/2 white flour and 1/2 whole wheat flour.

In usual fashion (so as not to disappoint!), I am posting about Linden turning 15 months old, when she will be 16 months old in 6 days.

This month has been so, so much ridiclous fun with our sweet girl! Linden has kept us all laughing with her awesome (and beyond her age, in my non-biased mommie opinion) sense of humor. For example…

We’re driving to Grandma & Grandpa E.’s one morning and she says, “Momma see, Momma see!” so I look in my handy-dandy mommie mirror in my CRV to see her sticking her right hand underneath and through her car-seat belt and waving it, along with her left arm, wildly and laughing at herself like she is the funniest person.ever. And of course, this cracks me up and I start laughing….so she continues to do this a couple more times until we’re both just laughing so.hard.

On another day, we were at dinner with Grandpa E. at Qdoba (Grandma E. was out in California visiting our new, adorable newphew) and Linden is eating bits and pieces of our buritto. She sticks a big piece of tortilla in her mouth, moves it to cover her teeth, and starts smiling and laughing and showing us all the tortilla mouth-piece she had created. Where does she come up with this stuff?

Something else that cracks Linden up is when Toby, Grandma & Grandpa E.’s grumpy cat, hisses at her when she comes near him. To most people, a cat hissing at them indicates the cat wants nothing to do with them and that you should back away. Linden does not feel this way – she knows that Toby secretly loves her and she thinks the hissing is an expression of how elated he is that she is chasing him…right…

At her 15 month well-visit earlier this month she weighed in at 24 pounds, 12 oz. (70th %) and was 33 inches tall (94th%) and her head was in the 45th%. These days she needs 24 month pants so they are long enough, but her 12 month skirts still fit her best around the waist. She will be a lucky girl to have this problem as she gets older.

Some of her latest words are:

* Beep, Beep!

* Vroom-Vroom! (notice a car theme here…)

* Juice

* Mine

* Fee! Fee! (Ryan chases her saying “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum…”

* Book

And one of our the sweetest new things she has started doing this month is giving kisses. *Sigh* It melts my heart every time.

The sweet kisses are certinaly appreciated and serve as a nice reminder that she is a sweet little girl, because sometimes that little onrey toddler attitude likes to creep out and try to taint the sweetness….but we are fighting it

These pictures were taken while Linden helped me make homemade whole-wheat pizza crust last Friday afternoon. She decided she had to taste-test every ingredient that went in to the crust…brown sugar, salt, flour, cornmeal…and surprisingly, she didn’t seem to think anything tasted bad. She was an awesome helper and we had so much fun making the pizza together!

In just 1 week I will be headed to Washington D.C. for a short work conference, and Ryan will fly out to join me 2 days later for a week of vacation! We are so excited to get to have time to get away together in such a cool city. If I think about it, this would be our first week long vacation together since our honeymoon. We are long weekend getaway junkies, but have not taken the time to take off an entire week for fun!

We are flying my mom in from Kansas to stay with Linden for the week, and while we will miss our sweet baby like crazy, I know that she will have a blast with Grandma N, and Ryan and I will certinaly enjoy the get away. In order to help the week go smoothly for both my Mom and Linden, I typed up an exhasutive document that I titled “Linden Schedule, Likes, Quirks and Other Helpful Tips.” I think the thing was almost 5 pages long, single spaced. I (at least) tried to make it witty and entertaining for Mom…when I sent it to her last week she said that it made her laugh, excited, and that it was very imformative. I also took the time to make an authorized and notrizied document that will allow my mom to make medical decisions for Linden, on our behalf, while we are traveling. I think I would reccommend this to any parent traveling out of town while their child stays with a loved one. It has already made both us and my Mom feel secure about the arrangement.

Ryan has been to D.C. at least twice, but he has promised me that he is still just as excited to go and explore as I am. We are staying in Downtown D.C. for 4 nights and staying in Old Town Alexandria, VA for 2 nights.

The rich American history that has taken place in and around D.C. has always been of interest to me, and I have always, always wanted to make a trip to our Nation’s Capitol. I am completly letting Ryan be our cruise director for the trip and have let him know if there are any specific things that I want to do…see the White House, visit the Museum of American History, the Lincoln Memorial, Arlington National Cemetary and the Washington Monument. Oh I am so very excited! Stay tuned…

I became an Aunt last Thursday to this sweet little Christian Isaac! We are so excited to have him in the family and cannot wait to watch him grow up. Christian is the son of Ryan’s sister, Erin, and her hubby, Steve.

We cannot wait to meet you little guy!

You can read all about Christian’s entry into the world here at Erin’s blog, and you can also read Ryan’s thoughts on his little newphew here.

BMW Winning Notification.

This was the subject line of the more than 6,000 e-mails that were sent out from my work e-mail account, via a hacker, to Lord knows who in about 1.5 hours yesterday morning.

You might be wondering how this could possibly have happened. Well, it all started on Tuesday evening when I noticed an e-mail from our system administrator telling me that I had exceeded the storage space for my e-mail account. The message said that I would need to delete messages to free up space, and then click through to a link to re-activate my account.

When I got to work yesterday morning, I realized that I had, in fact, not been getting e-mails and had a bunch sitting in my outbox, which I figured was due to exceeding my account limit.

So I clicked through the link in the e-mail from (what I thought was) our IT System Administrator. I entered in my e-mail address, user ID and password information for the network and clicked enter. The e-mails sitting in my outbox went out the door to their intended location, and my e-mail started to back-update from the time that I had exceeded my limit.

I then headed off to a meeting. During which, my blackberry was vibrating non-stop, notifying me of a new e-mail. Finally, I look at my phone only to see that I had recieved some 500 e-mails in about 30 min!!! They were messages from the System Administrator saying that an e-mail with the subject line BMW Winning Notification was undeliverable. I thought that was really, really, wierd, but I had to stay checked-in to the meeting I was at.

About an hour later I was back in my office and I called our IT Help desk to figure out was going on. At this point, I was up to some 6,000 e-mails telling me that some e-mail that I didn’t send about winning a BMW was undeliverable, apprently to many, many, many people!!

Before our IT desk could help me, he said that I had to provide my anniversary date for security purposes. I automatically assumed he was referring to my hire date, which I never, ever remember correctly. I told him that I thought it was either September 17, 18 or 19.

After I said this he laughed and said, “Gee, sounds like you’re really happy with YOUR marriage! You don’t even know your anniversary!”

I quickly explained that I am very, very happily married and I assumed he was asking for my anniversary/hire date here at work….

Our help desk guy then tried to be nice about the whole crazy mess of a  situation, but told me that I very foolishly gave out my password to a hacker, and that our IT staff will never ask for my password. Ugh! He then, probably rightly so, talked to me like I was an 80 year old woman who didn’t know what a computer was.

Oh brother!

Talk about embrassing, annoying and funny all wrapped up in to one!

The undeliverable messages are still coming in, by the 100s, but it really is  a much slower pace than yesterday and our IT folks assured me that this will all stop soon.

So, if you got an e-mail from me saying you won a BMW, I’m sorry, you really didn’t.

And I kind of defer my absent-minded, less than stellar-sharp behavior on the fact that Linden is getting 2 molars right now and decided to start yesterday at 4:45 a.m…yes, I am blaming my 15 month old.

We had our first dusting of snow in Denver yesterday and are suppose to get 6 in. – 1 foot of snow tonight! Phew – fall has certinaly arrived! The leaves on the trees are looking beautiful and I am enjoying wearing my sweaters and scarfs again.

Here are some pictures we took of Linden last week near our neighborhood.

Ryan is not a big fan of Halloween and costumes. But he humors my desire to dress up Linden and hand out candy to all the cute little kiddos that come to the door.

He even came up with what I think is a really cute idea for Linden this year…Pebbles. I think it would be fun to join Linden and be Wilma – I mean, come on, the woman wears pearls every day – we’re kindred spirits.

Now I’m just going to see if I can get him to dress up as Fred…